On the Death of Mary Daly

On Historiann's blog post, she mentioned that Mary Daly died, and talked about the discussion of Daly that spiraled down into feminist bashing on several other blogs: lots of people talking about her transphobia, which I don't really remember being a major part of her writing--it was the late 1970's, and there weren't that many transgendered people running around--who could afford that surgery? Of course, I was a kid and a pre-teen in the 70's, so I might be remembering wrong.

Notorious, Ph.D. did a lovely blog posting about Mary Daly, and I enjoyed reading it and the comments. I haven't read any Mary Daly in years, so once I got home, I pulled her books off the shelves, and was transported back to a time when I was a more fiery feminist. She also shaped my views on theology (for my views on her theology and how it shaped me, go to this post on my theology blog).

I remember reading Gyn/Ecology and both devouring it and having to take it slowly at the same time. I read her work and felt like the top of my head might come right off as my brain expanded.

Now I read it, and though it seems somewhat dated, I remember how it expressed all kinds of angry ideas that I didn't feel permitted to say. I remember thinking that we were all supposed to be liberated with all kinds of opportunities, but it still seemed like a man's world to me, especially when I got to graduate school.

Yet if you could strip away some of the angry, feminist language, you'd see that her ideas are still true today. For example, she quotes Valerie Solanis' view that males love death and get sexually aroused by death. Daly says, "The statement would seem to be adequately substantiated/documented by the state of this male-controlled planet. If patriarchal males loved life, the planet would be different" (p. 352). I find it hard to argue with that thought. Males still run the show on the planet, especially in developing nations. And they enact so many policies which do not enhance life on the planet, and in fact, endanger it.

I wish I could say that the status of women has improved since Daly's books first appeared, but it really hasn't. In many places, it's even more precarious to be a female (like the Congo, for one horrifying example). And we still haven't made the kind of progress that I'd like to see. During the State of the Union address this year, count the females in the room. It will be easy; they'll be the ones wearing colors. There will be about 30 of them in a sea of serious suits.

I also flipped through Pure Lust yesterday, which I don't think I ever read, in the same way that I read Gyn/Ecology or Beyond God the Father. Pure Lust doesn't have underlinings and passionately written notes in the margin. It does have linguistic leaps and leaps of logic. I read chunks of the book yesterday and recognized the graduate school writer that I was, the writer who drove my serious academic mentors crazy.

I'm old enough now to understand why I irritated them. I'm old enough to realize that my linguistic tendencies really belong to the world of poetry, not literary criticism. It's good to arrive at mid-life, having figured some things out.

I will always feel a fondness for those feminists of the 70's and 80's who blazed a trail for me and my compatriots. I've said before that Our Bodies, Ourselves changed my life in so many ways, and other feminist thinking worked the same magic. I miss that fierce anger that my younger self had, that fierce, transformative anger that so many earlier feminists had. At the same time, I'm aware of how much energy that level of anger takes, energy that won't be there to spend on other things, like creative pursuits or raising children.

Back to that question of balance, where I so often end up. Do I want to spend my time storming the barricades, demanding changes in the world? Do I want to write poems? Was I wrong to have decided not to have children? Is it a sign of moral weakness that so often these days, what I really crave is a nap?

I feel like Mary Daly would have judged me and found me lacking. My inner 19 year old certainly does. Yet my inner wise older crone (to use Daly's language) reminds me that there is a time for righteous anger, and a time for art, and a time for a meal shared with friends. There is even time for a nap. My wise crone self reminds me that all will be well and all will be well and all manner of things will be well (yes, I am aware that my wise older crone is actually Julian of Norwich; I'm cool with that).

While You're Waiting

Many of us consume many hours of time on our manuscripts, both of individual poems and of collections. But perhaps you've made your manuscript as good as it can be. You're still likely to have time between sending out the manuscript and publication. It might be lots of time. What can you do to get ready?

I've spent lots of years of my life thinking ahead, saying, "In the Fall, what will I wish I had done with all this lovely free time?" I've spent lots of time getting ready, because often, once the big event arrives, there is no more time.

In some ways, my chapbook publication was a great dry run, a rough draft of a book publication. I remember thinking, I wish I knew more about websites; I feel like I should have one. And now, I do.

Kelli Russell Agodon has a great post of what to do while you're waiting for your book to be published. Some of it you might have already done; I spent some time during the dull spots of a meeting composing a book description, because I want to submit to Graywolf this month, and they want that as part of the cover letter. Most of us have a bio or two.

Some of her suggestions are brilliant, like this one:

"8) If you have any reviews or articles about you online, cut and paste them into a MS Word file and save them on your computer.

This just happened to me. I went to get a couple sentences from an old (positive) review of my first book and it's gone. That means I have to find it in the Way Back Machine or cached somewhere else. Had I just had it saved in a document form, it would have saved me much work."

I always assume that online sources will be there forever, and alas, it's just not so. It never occurred to me to save the article in a different file. Duh!

For those of you who are earlier in the writing process and finding the thought of a book length manuscript daunting, perhaps you'd rather have some simpler resolutions. I particularly like Diane Lockward's post on her resolutions, particularly # 1: "Write on a more regular basis. Aim for three morning sessions per week. Show up at the kitchen table. Do chores later. Or not at all."

Sometimes I look at the work of other poets, and I just feel behind, especially when I see poets who are younger than I am, who have several books with spines. I forget that the main task of a writer is to write. I think of all the poets, like John Keats, who weren't known much at all in his day. I think of poets like John Donne, who have gone in and out of favor--there are centuries where his work would have been lost to us.

We don't have much control over the publication process, although we like to think we do. We can prepare, we can send out our work, but much of the rest is out of our power. It's important to remember to write, to remember that the writing of poems is what enriches our lives, not the publishing of them. Publication, and all that may or may not follow, is extra. The task of the poet is to observe, to make connections out of those observations, and to write them down.

Of Epiphanies and Other Shifts in Perspective

Today is officially the end of the Christmas season, the twelfth day of Christmas, the Feast of the Epiphany, the day that celebrates the Wise Men who visited the Baby Jesus. For an essay that contemplates the spiritual nature of this day, go here to visit my theology blog.

For those of us who aren't in the mood for a spiritual day, Epiphany still offers us a fine opportunity to think about our perspective and the kinds of insights we might wish to experience.

For example, yesterday I decided that the heat part of our new system just wasn't working. It took me some time to decide that we really didn't have heat. I turned the thermostat up to 70 degrees, and four hours later, the temperature inside the house had fallen four degrees.

Happily, it was an easy fix. One set of wires had been connected to the wrong place. A few simple turns of the screwdriver, and voila! We have heat.

This morning, as I made coffee, I thought about my parents, who left yesterday, and all the things I worried that might go wrong during their visit: noisy neighbors, the water being disconnected (I got a threatening bill the day before they arrived), one of us getting sick. It never occurred to me to worry that the heat wouldn't work. It's South Florida! We use the heat maybe two weeks a year at the most.

So, what happens? My parents visit during a record breaking cold snap, and we discover we have no heat.

If I was a character in a novel, this might be an epiphany moment. James Joyce, the master of the epiphany, would use it to show what a small, sad life I have. An inspirational writer would use my epiphany as a way to turn my life around: no more worries, since I'm always worrying for no good reason. A darker writer would be waiting to zap me with a bigger catastrophe, and readers could say, "Ha! Look at her, worrying over all the wrong things."

If you want to spend today thinking about epiphanies in literature, we might take a moment and read some of the masters of epiphany, like Flannery O'Connor or James Joyce. Here's what Garrison Keillor says about Joyce and epiphany on The Writer's Almanac:

"Around the time that Irish writer James Joyce was defecting from the Roman Catholic Church, he was investing secular meaning into the word "epiphany." In his early 20s, he drew up little sketches, sort of like "prose poems," in which he illustrated epiphanies. He explained to his brother Stanislaus that epiphanies were sort of 'inadvertent revelations' and said they were 'little errors and gestures — mere straws in the wind — by which people betrayed the very things they were most careful to conceal.' He also wrote that the epiphany was the sudden 'revelation of the whatness of a thing,' the moment when 'the soul of the commonest object ... seems to us radiant.'

It was a literary device that James Joyce would use in every story in his collection Dubliners (1914), a technique that he would become known for and that many modern writers would emulate. Joyce's Dubliners ends with a story set at a party for the Feast of the Epiphany, 'The Dead,' and the story ends: 'His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.'"

I will spend some of today thinking about epiphanies in poems. I tend to think of the use of epiphany as limited to fiction or essay writers, but I'm sure I'm wrong.

I also plan to write a poem about the Wise Women who visit the baby Jesus. Of course, they're erased from history because they realized the wisdom of Jesus, who would later instruct us to forgo housework so that we can focus on what's important and what might not be around us very long.

A few years ago I realized that I'm usually preparing syllabi on Epiphany proper. That led to great poem possibilities, which eventually became a poem--unpublished at this point, so I won't post it here.

Today is a great day to think about epiphanies, those moments of realization, those blips of insight. How can we be more alert to the possibility of epiphany, both in our writing and in our lives?

2010 Reading List

I read a great article at The New York Times, about older brains and how they learn; it's less about working puzzles and more about approaching tasks and thinking in new ways. At the end of the article I saw that the author has a book coming out this year, and so with this book, I start my 2010 reading list.

Here, in no particular order, is my list for 2010. In addition, I want to keep reading one book of poetry a month. And I want to keep buying at least one book of poetry a month. If poets don't support each other, how can we expect other people to buy our books?

1. The Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain by Barbara Strauch

This book joins the book from 2009 that I forgot to read:

2. My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey by Jill Bolte Taylor

Other books on the 2009 list that I want to get around to:

3. New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton

4. After the Baby Boomers: How Twenty- and Thirty-Somethings Are Shaping the Future of Religion by Robert Wuthnow

I'm already reading the next 3 books, so let me add those to my list of theology books to read:

5. The Liturgical Year: The Spiraling Adventure of the Spiritual Life by Joan Chittister

6. The Sacred Meal by Nora Gallagher

7. The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism by Timothy Keller

I want to read 2 books of history:

8. When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present by Gail Collins

9. History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism by Judith Bennett

I want to read two memoirs by writers:

10. The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History with Jigsaws by Margaret Drabble

11. Literary Life: A Second Memoir by Larry McMurtry

And let me not forget novels (and please, let me enjoy some vacation time like I had last August where I can just read novel after novel):

12. Gail Godwin, one of my old-time favorites, has just published a novel: Unfinished Desires

13. Lorrie Moore's latest book got lots of good press, so I'll give it a whirl: A Gate at the Stairs.

14. Richard Russo's book, That Old Cape Magic, will come back to the library shelves eventually; if that many people have checked it out, it must be good, right?

15. Zoe Heller is always a treat, so I'll read her latest, The Believers.

16. And last, but not least, I want to remember to read Barbara Kingsolver's latest, The Lacuna.

Writer's Resolutions--Monthly and Yearly

On November 1, I made some 2 month goals. How did I do?

Once again, I'll cut and paste the goals, and write underneath how I did. I'll use a different color, although those of you who read this blog on Facebook won't see the different color:

--keep writing a poem or two a week.

I only did this for 2 or 3 of the weeks of the last 8 weeks.

--organize next book-length manuscript and chapbook manuscript. The book-length manuscript will be my Jesus/God in the world poems and the chapbook manuscript will be the modern working women poems.

I accomplished this--hurrah!

--submit to the journals that stop taking submissions at the end of December.

I did this too.

--submit older book manuscript to 2-4 publishers.

I submitted the full-length manuscript to 2 publishers, and a chapbook manuscript to one publisher.

My goals for 2010 aren't much different from the ones I always post.

My main writing goal is to keep writing. I'd still like to write a poem or two or three a week and submit individual poems to journals.

But here's my main hope/dream/goal: by this time next year, I'd like to have a book forthcoming or published from a press that's reputable (I'm not averse to self-publishing, but I don't think that 2010 will be the best year for me to start a press). I'd love for it to be a book with a spine, although I'd also be happy with a chapbook.

2009 in Review--the Reader's Report

As 2008 drew to a close, I created a list of books that I wanted to read in 2009. Before the year-end taking stock gives way to new lists and resolutions, I wanted to check in with this list (if you want to read more about my experience of reading these books, I tagged them with "2009 reading list" and you can clink on the link to your right and see all the entries in one place.

I'll paste the list below and I'll put my comments in under each book. Maybe I'll put my comments in a different color!

2009 Reading List

1. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig

I read this one--it failed to move me the way that it did in high school and college, and I found the ending downright disturbing: "We're not really suffering mental illness. It's a sign that we alone are sane. Let's ride back off into America and get in touch with our inner voices!"

2. The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick

Great Book. Philip K. Dick continues to be amazing to my reading mind--one of my few high school reading passions that holds up over time.

3. A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr.

Also amazing--history is cyclical, knowledge is precious, but not held in high esteem, monasteries are more important than we realize . . .why wouldn't I still love this book?

When I looked up A Canticle for Leibowitz on Amazon, I discovered #4. I'm always a sucker for a good tale about the apocalypse--what could be better than a book of short stories? I can dip in and out:

4. Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse edited by John Joseph Adams

Great stories. I read most of the book, and I read it mostly at night when I couldn't sleep. Then I'd go back to sleep and conk right out, like a baby. What does that say about me?

There are 3 books by some of my favorite female authors that have come out recently:

5. People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks

Fabulous book. Skillfully done. Geraldine Brooks hasn't disappointed me yet, and all her books are so different. I read her books and say, "Why should I bother to write fiction, when more talented people are doing such a good job?"

6. Dreamers of the Day by Mary Doria Russell

I wanted to like this book. I read 50 pages before I decided that the main character just drove me nuts.

7. A Mercy by Toni Morrison

My favorite Toni Morrison book thus far, and a mind-blowing experience for such a short book. No other author, fiction or non-fiction, has helped me really understand what life in the colonies was like.

This one is probably the best book I read all year.

I added a novel that I've always meant to read, but haven't:

8. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (maybe my friend Elizabeth--who used to read this book several times a year--will read this at the same time as me and offer encouragement).

What was I thinking? The size was daunting. I didn't even try.

I wanted something to make me think about my brain in a different way:

9. My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey by Jill Bolte Taylor

I never got around to this one.

And of course, no list would be complete without some theology:

10. Any book by Thomas Merton (I've never read a whole book of his before)

I read part of New Seeds of Contemplation. Very good stuff. I plan to finish reading it.

11. The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Nope. Didn't get to this.

12. Tell it Slant: A Conversation on the Language of Jesus in His Stories and Prayers by Eugene Peterson

I read this one, but don't remember much of it.

And some Sociology about Religion (plus, I love this generational stuff!):

13. After the Baby Boomers: How Twenty- and Thirty-Somethings Are Shaping the Future of Religion

I'd still like to read this one.

And another book of essays by a modern master:

14. Citizenship Papers by Wendell Berry

I accidentally ordered 2 copies--and then, I didn't like the book. Heavy sigh.

And the last novel, which seems to wrap together many things: my love of theology, my love of poetry, my fascination with cloistered life of all kinds, my Victorian/Modern British Lit background . . .

15. Exiles by Ron Hansen

I read it and liked it, although it was different than I was expecting.

I also said that I would read one volume of poems a month, and most months I did so, although most months, I didn't write about what I was reading.

In the coming week, I'll post a 2010 list. I found it useful to have a list, even though I was less mindful of the list after August. I need a few days to think about my reading goals for 2010.

Good Reasons for Taking Stock

Yesterday, as I was counting up poems written for my writer's report, I came across some poems that I had forgotten writing, in a notebook that had been put in the wrong pile. I came across four poems that will fit perfectly in my new book-length manuscript. Hurrah! I had a few poems that didn't seem to fit, and I suspect I put them in the book-length manuscript because I was trying to hit a page number. But now I'll have a stronger book.

I had that experience of finding missing poems in the morning. And in the afternoon, I got a water bill that reminded me I hadn't paid the last bill and that my water would be cut off if I didn't pay. I always think that I'm a very organized person, that if you needed a piece of paper, I'd know exactly where to find it. I probably would, but some things do seem to fall through the cracks. And I don't always sort through my piles as often as I should.

That point has been driven home in several ways this week. I've moved offices at work and tried to sort through paper piles--amazing how old some of the information is. I got that bill that threatened to cut off my water--a panic inducing moment, since my parents will arrive later today, and I don't want them to arrive to a house with the water cut off; I paid the bill, so hopefully that won't happen.

I feel like I'm on top of everything, even though I sometimes feel harried and crabby. Should I see these incidents as early warning indicators, or should I just realize that these kind of moments happen to most adults? Am I trying to do too much? Should I scale back? Or do my jam-packed days account for my productivity?

I suspect that I'll wrestle with these questions for most of my life. Work-life-creative balance--it's the classic conundrum for our time (and I suspect most times).

Happy New Year! May we make reasonable goals and may the world respond. May we remember the less fortunate, who don't have the time, money, and other resources to make goals above simple survival. May we remember to be grateful, especially for all the small things we overlook: the bottle of wine that's delicious and affordable, the smile of someone we love, warm bread, the sun and the rain and the beautiful moon in all its phases, and the million small happinesses we get every day.